Lewis and Clark: Just another cog in the wheel of
history

Lewis and Clark passed within miles of Cahokia, the
largest town in pre-Columbian North America, located near
modern-day St. Louis. Between 900 A.D. and 1500 A.D., Cahokia was a
political, economic and ceremonial center that may have supported
more than 3

If American history west of the Mississippi "begins"
with Lewis and Clark, then Indian history and, by extension, the
history of the United States seems pretty simple: "Indians owned
the West, and then they lost it." But the story was never simple.
People built societies, and societies changed over time. The people
who survived dealt effectively with challenges from environment,
drought, disease, population growth and decline, new and closed
opportunities. They balanced tradition and innovation, weighed war
and peace, and endured encounters with Indian, Spanish, French,
British, and, eventually, American neighbors and newcomers.

Some communities collapsed, and some peoples
"disappeared" to the extent that they amalgamated with other
peoples and remade themselves. Nations like the Blackfeet, Lakotas,
Osages and Comanches had established, were in the process of
establishing, or were trying to hold onto impressive regional and
interregional hegemonies. Other less powerful or less fortunately
situated peoples like the Shoshones, Crows and Pawnees saw the
coming of Americans as an opportunity rather than a harbinger of
disaster. The fact that some of the people Lewis and Clark met had
"never seen a white man" did not mean they had not seen change.

Lewis and Clark did not see an unchanging West; they saw
"a snapshot of time and place." It was a landscape that had evolved
over millions of years, and an environment that had been shaped by
Indian and animal life for thousands of years. Crops, technologies,
and rituals from Mesoamerica; flora and fauna, plagues, and peoples
from Europe; and indigenous pioneers had all altered the West long
before Lewis and Clark arrived.

By the time the explorers
headed out from St. Louis, many of the people who had previously
inhabited the West were gone. Some had died only a couple of years
before, when another smallpox epidemic swept the Missouri Valley.
Others had been gone for centuries, and places like Mesa Verde and
Cahokia, an ancient city near the site of present-day St. Louis
that had once bustled with activity, were long silent. In other
places, Indian inhabitants remained where they had lived from time
beyond memory; it was the Spanish, French and English, who had
competed for their trade, their lands, their allegiance, or their
souls, who had come and gone.

Long before it became a
part of "America," the West was a land of combined races and
cultures. Indians and Europeans who had lived together for
generations produced mixed communities and people of mixed descent.
Indian and European cultures produced a new Hispanic culture in the
Southwest. Franco-Indian families and communities persisted in the
Great Lakes, Louisiana and the Midwest. Multicultural individuals,
many of them former captives, moved along intersecting Indian and
European exchange networks and webs of kinship relations built by
their experiences. In 1806, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis
described the settlers living on the banks of the Cane River near
Natchitoches as a "… mixture of French, Spanish, Indian, and
Negro blood."

Now came the Americans. The Osages
remembered seeing them on the left bank of the Mississippi,
"chopping trees and building and plowing and swearing." They had
hair on their faces like French voyageurs, "and soon the Little
Ones were calling them Heavy Eyebrows as well, but knowing them to
be Long Knives."

Jefferson did little to allay Osage
apprehensions. He told Osage and other delegates in Washington in
1806 that the United States had peaceful intentions, but "we are
strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heaven, and we are all
gun-men." As Lewis and Clark scholar James Ronda notes, the image
of "an American nation armed and on the move" was not lost on the
Indians. When Zebulon Pike and a party of Americans ascended the
Mississippi in 1806, Indians went out of their way to avoid meeting
them, having "the idea of our being a very vindictive, ferocious,
and warlike people." Lewis and Clark brought the promise of a new
power in the West. Indian people recognized the new power as more
aggressive than its predecessors, but at the same time, they saw
little to suggest that these newcomers would last any longer than
the ones that had come and gone before.

But the changes
would run deeper than that. Ronda notes that when Lewis and Clark
arrived on the Pacific Coast in December 1805, they came at the
wrong time and from the wrong direction as far as Native peoples
were concerned — they were accustomed to trading with traders
from the sea in the spring and fall. But Lewis and Clark "wanted to
reshape the landscape of time," Ronda writes. "Days and months once
measured in seasons and salmon runs were now to be calculated by
calendars and journal entries."

Lewis and Clark reshaped
time in other ways. By their feat, they created a new calendar:
American history in the West unfolded after Lewis and Clark;
anything that happened before was B.L.C. (before Lewis and Clark).
Millennia became concentrated into one "pre-American" time frame,
and with it a nation’s sense of its own ancient experiences
became stunted or lost entirely. Did the people who inhabited
Cahokia for 700 years think there would be a time when Cahokia no
longer existed? Did the Anasazi and Hohokam who irrigated the
deserts of the Southwest know that their systems and the way of
life they supported would ultimately fail? Could the people who
lived for thousands of years on buffalo or salmon ever have
imagined that the source of their life could become polluted, or
disappear entirely?

American expansion and occupation of
the West occurred in the blink of an eye, historically speaking. In
the late 19th century, buffalo were exterminated to make way for
cattle, Indians were dispossessed to make way for ranchers and
farmers. At the end of the 20th century, buffalo started returning,
and the cattle industry struggled to survive. And farming
communities on the Northern Plains experienced population decline,
while Indian populations in reservation communities increased to
reach precontact levels.

At the beginning of the 21st
century, the American West has an economy and a way of life that
depend on oil and water. But gauged against the long span of human
history in the West, this way of life is still a baby — and
the chances of it surviving infancy are not good. In the end,
automobiles and oil may not be that different from horses and
buffalo.

In 1997-’98, massive floods and snowstorms
hit the American West. The Western United States had not been
singled out for special treatment: All over the world, the climate
anomaly known as El Niño disrupted weather patterns and caused
chaos. In the wake of El Niño, scientists and historians
gained new understanding of how the global weather system affects
human societies and how short-term climate shifts have shaped
history. After about 3000 B.C., people began living in more
sedentary and concentrated farming societies. Populations grew, and
they became more vulnerable to short-term climate changes such as
El Niño. In 2180 B.C., for example, devastating droughts,
triggered ultimately by interactions between the atmosphere and the
ocean on the other side of the world, struck the Nile Valley and
toppled the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt. Fifteen hundred years
ago, the civilization of the Moche warrior-priests in northern Peru
collapsed under the impact of droughts followed by torrential rains
and flooding. A drought cycle gave the coup de gr^ace to a Mayan
civilization that placed great stress on the fragile Central
American lowlands. "The lesson," concludes archaeologist Brian
Fagan, "is simple: The ultimate equation of history balances the
needs of the population and the carrying capacity of the land. When
carrying capacity is exceeded and technology or social engineering
cannot restore the balance, all humanity can do is disperse —
if there is the space to do so."

There is no American
exceptionalism. Charting the creation and subsequent decline of
both Cheyenne and settler society in 19th-century Colorado,
historian Elliott West says simply: "Everything passes, … no
one escapes." It’s a simple reminder of the human condition
and a simple lesson from history. But it’s a lesson lost in
American history if we look on Jamestown, Santa Fe, the American
Revolution, and the Lewis and Clark expedition as opening chapters
in a story of nation building and progress, a story that, because
it is our story, we assume will be different from everybody
else’s. It won’t. The cycles of history will continue
as they always have, and, ultimately, the only truly exceptional
thing about American history will be that it happened in America.

Colin Calloway is the author of One
Vast Winter Count (University of Nebraska Press), from
which this essay was taken. He is a professor of history and chair
of the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth
College.